If there’s one thing you could change about your internship

David, our senior engineer, posed this question to me today over dinner and I honestly didn’t know the answer. I may be stagnating after a month of really fast paced work. Now that things are starting to settle, I find myself learning at a slower rate. Maybe it’s time to force myself to learn more.

The perks of working in a startup consist of insanely fast paced work culture and (somewhat) freedom of doing what you want. Given a project, I had almost full control of how I want to achieve the end product. The pitfalls that comes with this would be the lack of a proper structure of how should an intern learn. Similar to how CS1101S throws us into the deep end, expecting us to somehow figure things out. It’s pretty much independent learning while making full use of the resources you have around you.

Just a few things off my head that I want to achieve in the remaining two months:

Learn to give a short technical talks about side projects, cool new technologies etc.

Have a firm grasp of CSS architecture, and refactor most of the CSS/LESS that I’ve written

Get a clearer picture of the entire deployment process, I’ll need it for Tembusu’s orientation website in time to come

Increase productivity by learning to use my tools well (Git, iTerm2, Sublime/Vim etc.)

Get off caffeine & junk food dependencies

The last one is pretty important. I shouldn’t be fuelled by caffeine and chips all the time.

For a start, I’ve been trying to write in xbili.com more frequently about what I learnt during work. Yes, I’ve bought my own domain just to play around.